Ski Racing

GIANT SLALOM RACING SKI DESIGN CONTROVERSY

Despite protests by many racers, the International Ski Federation (FIS) is on track to require longer, straighter giant slalom skis in World Cup and Olympic competition beginning in the 2011-12 season. 

In March 2011, FIS announced that, based on a five-year study undertaken through the University of Salzburg, it had identified several areas for racing safety improvement and would require changes in course setting (to reduce racing speeds), snow conditions, and equipment design.

In regard to equipment, the FIS study measured pressure applied by experienced male racers to various GS race skis, and found that athletes applied less pressure to prototypes of longer, straighter skis than to current designs. Accordingly, FIS called for changing the minimum sidecut radius of a giant slalom ski from 27 meters to 40 meters, beginning with the 2012-13 World Cup and Europa Cup season (other FIS series will have to comply beginning with the 2013-14 season).

A storm of protest followed. Dozens of racers objected. GS World Champion Ted Ligety was the most outspoken of them. Writing in Ski Racing and on his own website, TedLigety.com, he forecast more injuries, not fewer. For one thing, Ligety argues, younger racers have spent their entire careers training on 21- and 27-meter GS skis and may not fare well reverting to a step-and-slide-to-an-edgeset method of turn initiation. The longer, straighter skis may work to the advantage of taller, stronger skiers over lighter, more agile competitors. This point also implicitly raises the issue that none of theSalzburg testers were women. In July, a letter to FIS from ski manufacturers raised technical objections, including the reality that they would need more time to design and test new skis. It was signed by executives at Amer Sports (Atomic and Salomon), Fischer, Head, Nordica, Rossignol and Stoeckli.

On August 24, 2011 FIS announced that after consultation with the Ski Racing Suppliers Association, it had revised the mandate to 35 meters for men and 30 meters for women. At the same time, maximum stand height (the distance between the ski base and boot sole) will shrink from 50mm to 45mm. The goal of the equipment changes is apparently to force a return to an earlier style of skiing, in which the turn begins with a step instead of a nearly instantaneous edge change, and the carving/accelerating portion of the turn is thus reduced.

You have to go back to the 1980s, the era of Pirmin Zurbriggen, to find race GS skis with more than a 35-meter radius. By 1990, course-setters were placing GS gates further across the fall line, and the engineers making limited-production skis for the national teams reacted by making the skis turnier – usually by reducing waist width from about 68mm to around 62mm. The 1991 K2 GS Race got into production with a 62mm waist and a sidecut radius under 32 meters, even at the 210cm length. Race-room skis from all the major factories used similar geometries, two years before Elan revolutionized the recreational sport with the SCX series of shaped skis. I have a pair of GS skis from Blizzard, circa 1991, with a 61mm waist.
 

In the mid-90s, with the introduction of true shaped skis, both length and sidecut radius plummeted. GS skis as short as 175cm arrived with 15-meter sidecuts.

Then FIS stepped in. For the 2003-04, minimum sidecut radius was set at 21 meters, with a 185cm minimum length for men and 180cm minimum length for women. Stand height, which affected both the leverage a skier could apply to edging and the angle at which the boot would ground on the snow, was limited to 55mm. Four years later, radius increased to 27 meters for men and 23 meters for women, stand height came down to 50mm, and the minimum waist width increased from 60mm to 65mm. The width change made a dramatic difference in the way the ski behaved on hard snow: it centralized pressure under the boot at high edging angles.

Rupert Huber, vice president for product development for Amer Sports (Atomic and Salomon), says his athletes have tested 35-meter prototypes and are satisfied they can compete successfully on them. Since 2004, Amer has been a major sponsor of the Christian Doppler Laboratory at the University of Salzburg’s Institute of Sports Science, and has used the laboratory’s findings in its own product development programs. President of Amer’s wintersports division is Dr Michael Schineis, who also serves as president of the Ski Racing Suppliers Association.

Boot and binding designer David Dodge sent FIS a letter citing previously published skiing safety research and suggesting that theSalzburgstudies were flawed. Specifically, he noted that a trained athlete will always put 100 percent effort onto a familiar piece of equipment, and be tentative on something novel – like a longer, straighter prototype. Once athletes become used to the new geometry, they will go 100 percent again. Moreover, they will angulate further to achieve today’s turning radii, leading to a rise in unstable-knee injuries.

It’s unclear why FIS singled out GS skis for attention. Over the first three years of the Salzburg study, FIS alpine racers suffered 59 severe knee injuries, defined as time loss more than four weeks. The Oslo Sports Trauma Research Centerstudied video of 20 of those injuries. Ten occurred in downhill, one in Super G, seven in GS and two in slalom. Ligety claims that over the past two seasons, only three top-30 GS stars have been hurt, and none of those crashes was caused by the skis. He also points out that both slalom specialists and downhill specialists also run GS, so that more runs happen in GS than in any other discipline. That means the frequency of injuries in GS is much lower than in downhill.

Presumably, assuming the manufacturers will allow it, FIS will eventually address the issue of binding release, or design. Then we may see some progress beyond today’s lowest-common-denominator DIN standard.

Photo: Tom Kelly/US Ski Team

In the beginning, there was the vision of John Fry.

He was the youthful editor-in-chief of SKI Magazine during the 1960s. The United States ski industry was young in the 1960s - and growing fast.

Fry saw some things that disturbed him about American ski instruction and ski area management, including:

• Ski schools concentrated on teaching "style" with no definite scoring system to measure a student's progress or a skier's general proficiency.
• There was no organized national competition for the recreational skier when, all research indicated, the recreational skier comprised 95 per cent of the total skiing population.
• Certain areas refused even to allow the setting of gates for race practice.

In the October, 1967 edition of SKI, Fry wrote a strongly-worded editorial deploring the "sorry state of affairs" of skiing at that time.

"We have forgotten that skiing is a sport, sport is competition, and that is what the fun and excitement is all about." He went on to say that the forbidding of practice in gates "is a policy that surpasses imbecility."

"Somewhere along the line, skiing has lost touch with competition. When it happened, we snuffed out a flame that should light our sport. It is sorely in need of re-ignition."

Fifteen years later, John described the tone of his words as "somewhat irascible." Maybe so, but his opinion of those ski industry practices was right on the mark. And that editorial carried in it the seed of the idea for Nastar.

During the 1967-68 winter, he pressed forward with his idea about establishing a program for recreational skiers with a national standard. "Wherever I went - to ski areas or meetings of ski industry people - I asked people if they had any ideas about how skiers could measure their speed, ability or performance on some kind of a common basis."

The French Connection

On a trip to Vermont, Fry was told by Bob Gratton, the ski school director at Mt. Snow, that he might gain some valuable insight by studying the French Chamois Races.

NASTAR uses the principal of time percentages to calibrate a skier's ability, a concept pioneered by France's Ecole de Ski Nationale Chamois program. For certification, a ski instructor had to perform well enough in the Ecole's annual Challenge to earn a silver medal.. . be less than 25 percent behind the time recorded by the fastest instructor. The Chamois  was a regular slalom race course with hairpins and flushes. A certified instructor, back at his home area, could set the pace for local participants  in Chamois races. His time was not re-calibrated or speeded up, as in Nastar, by the amount he lagged behind the winning time in the annual Challenge. The Nastar idea of adjusting a local pacesetter's time to a national standard was introduced in France 20 years later,in the winter of 1987-88. SNMSF (Syndicat National des Moniteurs de Ski Francais) introduced Fleche, an open-gated giant slalom, during the same winter that Nastar began, though unknown to Nastar's founder Fry. 

Fry envisioned another possibility. "It didn't take long for the dim bulb in my cerebrum to light up and see that simple, open-gate giant slalom races on intermediate slopes could attract hundreds of thousands of people to measure their skiing ability."

The idea for the new program had now crystallized in John's mind.

First, top racers and instructors nationwide would come together at the beginning of the season to rate their performance against the best U.S. racer of the time. Then they would return to their home resorts as pacesetters.

The times recorded by these local pacesetters, adjusted by the amount of their percentage ratings, would create a national standard. And that standard could be used to compare the performances of recreational racers throughout the country.

If pacesetter Roger at Steamboat was originally 6 per cent slower than the nation's fastest racer, and a Steamboat guest was 20 per cent slower than Roger, then he or she was about 26 per cent slower than America's fastest skier would have been if he'd skied the Steamboat course that day. The guest had a 26 handicap.

In addition to comparing skiers around the nation, handicaps would be used as the basis for awarding pins (gold, silver, bronze) according to a racer's level of proficiency.

Naming the Program

Top management at SKI Magazine was very supportive of Fry and his idea, which he wanted to call the National Standard Race, with the acronym "Nastar." Together, they decided to organize a pilot program for the 1968-69 season.

Of primary importance was finding a sponsor capable and willing to fund a national program. "We found out that the advertising agency for the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Co. was interested in sponsoring some kind of ski program," recalled Fry. "I flew to Chicago and we presented it to them."

The ad agency people were very interested, but they absolutely insisted on calling the program "the Schlitz Open." When John returned to New York and told his German-speaking wife about the negotiations, she burst into laughter. "What's so funny?," he asked. She informed him that Schlitz is the German word for the fly on a man's pants.

Armed with his new linguistic expertise, Fry telephoned the ad agency to re-open negotiations. "Ski areas employ many German-speaking instructors," he told them. "You guys would be laughed off the mountain."

Schlitz finally decided to support the program with the name "Nastar." They also would sponsor an invitational final event, named "The Schlitz Giant Slalom," to which the best Nastar ski racers of the winter would be invited - at no cost to the competitors.

The Original Eight

The program really began to take shape in the fall of 1968 when eight ski areas signed on to take part in the inaugural season. They represented a geographical cross section of American ski country: Alpental, Washington; Boyne Country, Michigan: Heavenly Valley, California; Mt. Snow, Vermont; Mt. Telemark, Wisconsin; Song Mountain, New York; Vail, Colorado; and Waterville Valley, New Hampshire. Jimmie Heuga, an American hero since winning a medal in the 1964 Olympics, signed on as the first national pacesetter. Gloria Chadwick, who had just left the USSA, took on the job of secretary/coordinator of Nastar.

Tom Corcoran organized and hosted the first Pacesetter Trials, which were held at Waterville Valley in early December. The eight areas sent their top pros to earn a pacesetter rating. At those trials, Manfred Krings of Mt. Snow equalled Heuga's zero handicap.

Computer specialist Charlie Gibson programmed the original Nastar handicap tables used by ski areas to determine gold, silver and bronze pin winners.

Bob Beattie

Only 2,297 persons took part in Nastar that first season. However, by the time of the March Finals at Heavenly Valley, word-of-mouth praise was attracting the interest of many more recreational skiers. For the second year of operation, plans called for expansion to 35 participating ski areas. This would mean increased costs, and thus a need for more sponsors to share the greater financial load. Nastar needed a salesman who could move easily in the atmosphere of top-level management.

Bob Beattie, who had recently resigned as head coach of the U.S. Alpine Team, was just such a man. He became Nastar commissioner, a position he would hold for 30 years.

By the start of the 1969-70 season, Beattie had sponsorship agreements with TWA, Bonne Bell and Hertz to ease the financial load on Schlitz and SKI Magazine (owner of Nastar). He and Gloria Chadwick had signed up 39 areas, and the program was really rolling.

Then and Now: Different Practices

The basic Nastar system has remained the same for 35 years. But a few practices in the early seasons may be surprising to modern racers, including:

No age divisions. Although the percentages needed to earn pins varied slightly from men to women, there were no age divisions whatsoever the first year.

That meant a 70-year-old racer had to ski just as fast as one who was 25 years old in order to win any kind of pin.

Nastar leaders discovered this was not very practical, and the format was soon changed. Adults were split into ten-year age divisions with varying handicaps needed to earn pins. The ten-year brackets would continue until 1999, when adult divisions started being split every five years.

A program for junior racers (originally sponsored by Pepsi Cola) was started in the early 1970s. Like the adults, there were several age divisions with varying handicaps needed to win pins.

Presentation of pins. In modern times, most ski areas give pins to winners at the bottom of the course at the time of the race. A much bigger production was made of the Nastar pin presentation process in the early years.

Racers were allowed to earn only one pin per year in each of the three (gold, silver, bronze) categories. Those pins were mailed to the winners at the end of the season, and their names were published in SKI Magazine.

In the program's second season (1969-70), SKI reported that 664 gold pins were awarded. The number grew to nearly 3,000 by 1972-73.

Changing Role

With Beattie and his World Wide Ski Corp. staff on board to manage the administration of the program, the role of Fry and SKI Magazine changed to one of editorial support.

And SKI has given plenty of publicity, running stories about Nastar very regularly.

"I have always believed that a special interest magazine like SKI should not only report journalistically," Fry said, "but should get actively involved in advancing programs which are good for the sport. I think that Nastar has more than fulfilled that role." The editorial support helped propel participation in the program to an even higher level than was dreamed by its pioneering founders in the 1960s.

Crans-Montana, Kitzbühel dispute first downhill race

In early April 2011, a commemorative race was held on the ski slopes of Crans-Montana, Switzerland, to mark the 100th anniversary of the first Roberts of Kandahar downhill. Some 260 participants, organized into 60 teams, descended eight miles from the Plaine-Morte to Montana-Violettes, most of them wearing vintage skis and clothing, including retro glacier glasses. In the promotional flyer, event organizers said the race also marked the centennial of the “first official alpine ski race in history.”

This claim is contested by ski historians in Kitzbühel, who produced documents from the Kitzbühel Winter Sports Club, which held a “Ski Race for the Club Master Title” on the Hahnenkamm in April 1906. The timed downhill race covered three kilometers (1.86 miles) with a vertical drop of 624 meters (2,047 feet). It was won by Sebastian Monitzer in eight minutes, one second. “The quoted difference in altitude and route are almost identical to [the course] used for the ladies downhill in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the Super G of today,” says the club’s letter of rebuttal. “Further ‘pure downhill’ races were held in subsequent years,” including a team downhill in February 1910. –John Fry

FOUNDER CALLS IT A DISSERVICE TO GUESTS

 The National Standard Race, NASTAR –designed in 1968 – brought the equivalent of golf’s par to skiing. Now, one of the eight original NASTAR ski areas, Vail, has decided to pull itself and its other Colorado ski resorts out of the 44-year-old national recreation racing program. NASTAR founder John Fry calls Vail’s decision “a disservice to its guests.”

The NASTAR handicap is the percentage gap between a recreational skier’s time and that of the local pacesetter, whose own handicap derives from his performance against a top racer on the U.S. Ski Team. NASTAR races are short, open giant slalom-type courses, usually on intermediate terrain. Last season, a skier could compare his or her rating – gold, silver, bronze — to that of anyone at any of 120 resorts across North America.

In 2011-12, nearly 100,000 skiers compared their race times to pacesetter and U.S. Ski Team racer Steve Nyman. Due to the poor snow season, participation was down 8.4 percent from the 568,428 runs of the 2010-11 season. During that big year, Vail ranked as the most NASTAR-crazy resort in the nation, posting 29,310 runs. Beaver Creek was second, with 20,062 runs. Together, four Vail Resorts in Colorado accounted for more than 13 percent of all NASTAR runs in 2010-11.

That won’t be the case in 2012-13. This coming season, Vail is abandoning NASTAR in order to create its own standard race linked to the company’s EpicMix online skier-tracking program. The program will operate at Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge and Keystone in Colorado, and at Heavenly, Kirkwood and Northstar at Lake Tahoe.

NASTAR director Bill Madsen takes Vail’s exit philosophically. “Vail’s business model is to own everything that happens on the mountain. We will miss them. We think of NASTAR as a unifying force for the ski industry as a whole, and our championships as a unifying event.”

Four years ago, in a similar action, Vail Resorts withdrew its participation and funding from Colorado Ski Country USA, which promotes skiing at Colorado resorts.

NASTAR’s creator John Fry, former Editor-in-chief of SKI Magazine whose publisher came to own the program, is puzzled by Vail’s decision. “In the past, Vail guests coming from the East, Midwest or Far West, could enhance their NASTAR standings earned at their home ski area. That’ll no longer be possible.

“It’s difficult to see why Vail resorts would be doing this to their guests,” Fry continues. “Vail Resorts owns seven golf resorts. I doubt it would stop recognizing the handicaps guests hold at their home courses.”

Pacesetter for the EpicMix race season will be Vail skiing ambassador Lindsey Vonn, current World Cup women’s champion. EpicMix will hold a finale championship, to compete with NASTAR’s national championship, scheduled for Aspen/Snowmass at the end of March. The U.S. Ski Team, of which Vonn is a member, plays a prominent role in the Nastar championships, and even uses the handicap ratings of sub-teen racers to spot future talent.

EpicMix will rate racers by the number of seconds they’re behind the pacesetter, whose time is calibrated to Lindsey Vonn. Performance through the season is recorded on the skier’s pass, which is equipped with a radio-frequency identifying chip that also records lift rides and keeps a running total of vertical footage skied. Now the chip will automatically register the racer at the starting gate, billing the racer for each run ($5 or $6, according to a Vail press release). Finish times will post automatically to the EpicMix database. Race times, digital medals, leaderboards and race photos will be viewable on the EpicMix website and on the smart-phone app. Results can also be sent to a racer’s Facebook page or Twitter account.

It’s not the first time NASTAR has faced competition. The Equitable Family Ski Challenge, launched in the 1970s, ultimately failed.

The national pacesetter for NASTAR in the original 1968 season was Jimmie Heuga. The pacesetters for the upcoming 2012-13 season are U.S. Ski Team stars Ted Ligety and Julia Mancuso.

Giant slalom was invented in Italy in 1935 —  the result of an accident of weather, according to a recent article in the magazineSciare.  It happened when a downhill race, scheduled to take place on January 19, 1935, in Mottarone, above Lake Maggiore in Piedmont, had to be modified because of lack of snow.

In place of the classic, open downhill of the time, the FISI (Italian Ski Federation) commissioner Gianni Albertini decided

Helmuth Lantschner at Kitzbuehel, 1939

to prepare a new course with gates, forcing the racers to follow a specific path down the mountain.  The vertical drop was quite small, 300 meters (a thousand feet), so he decided that the race should be in two runs.  The winner, Austria’s Helmuth Lantschner took two minutes thirty-one and one-fifth seconds. Giacinto Sertorelli, the Italian ace, was third, six seconds behind.

FISI was so satisfied with the new formula that they officially introduced the giant slalom race in the Italian championships at Cortina, February 12, 1935.  A course was prepared on the Olympia delle Tofane, 900 meters vertical drop, course setter, once again, Gianni Albertini.  Twenty-six male competitors started.  The race was won by Giacinto Sertorelli, in six-and-a-half minutes.  Six women competed.  The winner was Paula Wiesinger, in eight minutes 19.8 seconds.

A recent article in Skiing Heritage gave attention to the American contribution to the development of the GS —  a 1937 race at Mt. Washington. Yet it was the Italians who sponsored an annual—and international—race.  In 1936 there was one on a shortened course on the Marmolada, won  by Eberhardt Kneissl of Austria. Full 50-gate slaloms were won in 1937 by Josef Gstrein (AUT),  in 1939 by Vittorio Chierroni (ITA).  Women’s races took place in 1935 with Gabriella Dreher (ITA) winning, Elvira Osirnig (SUI) in 1936.

Aspen in 1950 marked the first FIS World Alpine Ski Championships to include giant slalom. The gold medal was won by Italy’s Zeno Colò, who also won the downhill and took a silver in slalom. From the FIS GS at Aspenonward the GS was a one-run race until the World Championships at Portillo,Chile, in August 1966 when the men raced two runs, the women still one run. Four years later at Val Gardena, Italy, women began to race two runs in world championship GS.

Matteo Pacor, who operates the superb racing results website www.ski-db.com, recalls his first experience of watching a two-run giant slalom during the Innsbruck Olympics in 1976, held over two days.  “I was ten years old and a huge fan of Ingemar Stenmark.  He skied badly in the first run.  I didn’t sleep well.”

(Matteo Pacor, John Allen and John Fry contributed to this article. Photo of Helmuth Lantschner shot in Kitzbuehel, 1939)